Week 1

Class Ground Rules

Read all the assignments before class.
Keep yourself on mute unless called on.
Raise your hands electronically.
Focus your comments only on the question at hand rather than straying to other parts of the story.
Refrain from offering a review of the whole story or jumping to the end.
Try to support your comments by referring to details from the text.
Listen to and respond to others with respect.

What Distinguishes a Short Story?

Lorrie Moore – “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” And “Short stories are about trouble in mind. A bit of the blues. Songs and cries that reveal the range and ways of human character. The secret ordinary and the ordinary secret. The little disturbances of man.”

Francine Prose – “Unlike most novels, great short stories make us marvel at their integrity, their economy. If we went at them with our blue pencils, we might find we had nothing to do. We would discover that there was nothing the story could afford to lose without the whole delicate structure collapsing like a souffle….The sense of the artistic whole, this assurance that nothing has been left out and that nothing extraneous has been included, is part of what distinguishes the short story from other pieces of writing.”

Emma Donoghue – “The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.”

Stephen King – “A short story is a different thing all together – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

George Saunders – “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.”

Ernest Hemingway – “If a writer knows about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows….The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-ninth of it being above the water.”

The shortest short story:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

--Ernest Hemingway

What to Think About When Reading a Short Story

Opening - Give special attention to the first sentence and opening paragraph. What does it reveal? What tone does it set for the story? How does it gain your attention?

Plot - What happens in the story? Tessa Hadley said, “Stories for me begin with those two questions, which sound so banal but are, in fact, the richest and most mysterious ones: What happened? And: What happened next?” But, Anton Chekov thought that a story should have neither a beginning nor an end, but should just be a "slice of life," presented suggestively, and that it’s up to the readers to draw their own conclusions.

Characters – Who are the characters and how do they interact with each other? Are you sympathetic to them? Do they interest you? Do you judge them? Root for them? According to William Faulkner, a short story is character driven and a writer's job is to “trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

Narration – Is it first, second, or third person narration? If third person, does it seem to give special attention to one character’s point of view (third person close or limited) or does it seem omniscient and providing multiple points of view (e.g., As the campers settled into their tents, Zara hoped her eyes did not betray her fear, and Lisa silently wished for the night to quickly end.)? How does the narrative point of view affect the story?

Chronology – Is the story told in chronological order or does it move around in time? Does it take place in a single span of time or multiple periods? How does this influence the story?

Chunks and Breaks - Often a story is arranged in sections/chunks with breaks between. Try to discern the action and meaning in each chunk. Does the chronology or narrative view shift from chunk to chunk? Why do you think the author arranged it this way?

Author Intention/Purpose - What does the author want you to see or discover? Is it a puzzle or mystery? Is it a feeling – empathy, revulsion, identification? William Boyd said, “Short stories seem to answer something very deep in our nature as if, for the duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common, turbulent journey towards the grave and oblivion.”

Every Element is Essential - If something seems odd or out of place to you, try to seek out why the author put it there and how it relates to the rest of the story.

Author’s Story, Not Your Story - While a story may remind you of something in your own life, acknowledge that, let it inform your reading, but put it aside and return to thinking about the story itself. Stay in the story, in the world the author created for you.

Look It Up - If the story refers to a word, event, poem, song, person that is unfamiliar to you, Google it and figure out how it supports the story.

I realize I have placed one of Moore's most unconventional, and perhaps difficult, stories first. Please don't be discouraged. Mark Twain said that if you have to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning. And if you have to eat two frogs, eat the biggest one first. We'll tackle this together! --Marlene

READ (at least twice): "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)," pp. 230-240. (Published in Self-Help, 1985; https://www.shortstoryproject.com/stories/how-to-talk-to-your-mother-notes/.)

Lorrie Moore implements an unconventional style that provides a unique perspective for the familiar topic of mother-daughter relationships.

Think About:

The curiosity of second person narration.
The chronology and how it affects the story.
The mother-daughter relationship.
Any lyrical phrases, sentences, or passages you particularly admired.
The historical events – such as the bombing of Nagasaki, man landing on the moon, the invention of the artificial heart – and how they contribute/relate to what is going on in each era for the woman in the story.
Optional - Just for fun, try reading this story from back to front.

Purely Optional & Amusing

Kurt Vonnegut - The Shape of Stories

Kurt Vonnegut's Eight Essential Tips on How to Write a Short Story

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Week 1 Class Recording:

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